Smarty Uninstaller

Don't know how many grabbed this GOTD yesterday, but wanted to post this before anyone had much of a chance to use it.

Ran Smarty Uninstaller through its paces, creating a snapshot to monitor the installation of QILING Disk Master Pro, then used Smarty Uninstaller to remove QILING Disk Master Pro, checking for leftovers afterwards in a win7 32 bit VM. Smarty Uninstaller was more ambitious than most uninstaller apps, attempting to remove the 2 drivers QILING Disk Master Pro added -- the bad news is that it only partially succeeded, which can sometimes be worse than not trying at all.

One driver was left installed -- the file was there, along with the keys it needs in the registry. The .inf file, & the copy of the driver install files that Windows makes were deleted. That's not Terrible bad, though Windows wouldn't be able to reinstall that driver, e.g. when doing a win10 version upgrade, & seeing that it is installed, the upgrade process would probably try to reinstall or reuse it. I don't *think* this would cause win10's upgrade setup routine to fail or show an error message, though the device might show up flagged in Device Mgr.

The other driver was partly removed -- the file was gone but its registry keys remained... that's a sometimes iffy proposition. Because it's in the driver section of the registry, Windows will try to load it, and of course find the file missing, so it can't. That may not trigger anything, or it might cause an error, depending on the driver involved & if any other software goes looking for it when Windows starts. IOW nothing at all might happen, or you might see an error message, or worst case, Windows won't start -- I've seen all 3 happen at one time or another when a driver file is deleted but not its registry keys.

Thank you, mikiem2! Although I didn't take advantage of D/I Smarty Uninstaller, I did give it some thought (I've used Revo Free for years). Your documenting your experience should be very helpful to those who have installed Smarty. Hopefully Smarty sets a restore point first, as Revo does (Windows 7), even though that's not fool-proof.

The ages of your computers are not as important. What is important is whether either one has a 32- or 64-bit processor.

My computer is from late 2014, and it has a 64-bit processor.

I quite agree. However, since just about the first thing I put on ANY computer is the uninstaller (after any virus checker is installed -- if any), I needed to put Revo on these two 64 bit machines ASAP and as you noted, in 2015, Revo for 64 bit wasn't available for free. One copy is registered in my name and the other in my husband's name but I'm the one who uses it in both cases. I was nice -- when I "customized" the skin, I didn't choose pink and purple for his copy. :)

My Desktop dates back to 2012 (purchased for $100 off retail at Walmart 1 week AFTER Windows 8 came out - but is Windows 7) and my laptop is from 2015 (running Windows 8.1).